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vanagon 3 speed auto tranny...

Helped my friend put an EJ22 in his 86 Westy last spring...entertaining project for sure. The conversion went well overall, taking about a week of us dakking with it for several hourse each day, running into a few minor glitches here and there but no big problems. Of course, the engine we got turned out to be a dud and had a rod bearing failure about 1500 miles later, but he got another motor and it now runs fine (just did a round trip from oregon to so-cal and back).

Anyway, my questions concern the transmission. Unfortunately, the rig is equipped with a 3 speed automatic. Seems like a pretty good tranny, but I'm inherently prejudiced against automatics, primarily from a reliability standpoint, but also because of fuel economy. With that in mind, I have two questions.
1. For those of you who have owned VW autos, how good are they? This one seems like a "solid" tranny, but are they reliable?
2. Has anybody here done an auto-to-manual conversion? If so, how big of a deal is it?

so glad i came across this post before i made the typical noob mistake and posted my problem. do you guys happen to know the name of the company that makes the cooler kit? also, just out of curiousity, is there an option to swap out the transmission as well? I'm not looking to do an auto to manual conversion. looking for something maybe more heavy duty than the standard 3 speed auto.

i tried clicking the link and i got this message:

"Vanagon.com is moving to a new server and an entirely new development platform. Unfortunately our previous server became unavailable unexpectedly (the hosting service shut down) so we weren't able to make this a smooth transition.

Most of the site should be back in operation. Over the next two weeks we'll be testing and restoring any functionality we have missed. We hope to be fully back by Sunday March 23rd. In the meantime, we apologize for the inconvenience.

The Vanagon Mailing List ('Gerry') is unaffected by this, and still happily up and running."